Posted on 09/03/2025 2:24:39 AM PDT by Salman
A civilization confident in itself reads the Iliad. A civilization in decline denounces it. Guess which one we are.
A confident civilization does not quake at the sight of Homer. It does not avert its gaze from Pericles or issue trigger warnings before mentioning Caesar. It does not treat the Iliad like some toxic spill to be cordoned off by hazmat crews. Yet ours does. As Victor Davis Hanson and John Heath warned in Who Killed Homer?, the gravest threat to the classics is not public indifference but professors themselves—men and women who, having ceased to teach Homer, now cower before him.
The new orthodoxy insists the ancients are perilous. Donna Zuckerberg, sister of the better-known Mark, solemnly warns that the “alt-right” is mainlining Plato as a gateway narcotic to fascism. Curtis Dozier and Patrice Rankine join the chorus: To admire Achilles is apparently to goose-step straight to Charlottesville. Mary Beard, once a formidable scholar, now devotes her days to rebuking anyone rash enough to suggest the West owes anything to Greece and Rome. Donald Kagan, who for decades taught Yale undergrads their Thucydides, foresaw this decay—the impulse to regard antiquity not as civilization’s accumulated wisdom but as an ideological contaminant, a cultural bat virus to be locked down and quarantined.
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(Excerpt) Read more at takimag.com ...
‘that journey’ ?
you know their destination?
off coast ship?
canal zone?
Nope. We have to go with what Trump/Marco says.
I’ve had custody of my 15-yo granddaughter for her entire life. Since Kindergarten, she’s been in a charter school that teaches American values and honors the Founding Fathers. They teach-and enforce-honor and integrity. Two years of Western Civ is required to graduate.
They employ phonics and also teach Latin. The students read-and report on-the Iliad and the Odyssey along with Ovid’s Metamorphoses.
Next year, in her junior year, the entire class will study the Roman Republic-in ROME!
A suitable punishment for not cooking a whale tail by holding it in one hand and showing it a hot coal in the other...
LOL!
So yer shipping on the Pequod are ye?
Thank you, I’m glad I wasn’t the only one that thought this was about Homer SImpson.
I have not read it. I am basing my statement on her translation of The Odyssey.
What you said, Spencer.
Maybe words provide a clue to the universe, especially the center of the word, like the very core of a note most in tune.
Next, they’ll be banning Moby Dick
the one about Narcissus?
Call me Ishmael...
The dog?
The dog?
Guy Gibson didn’t get much sleep that night. And to make matters even worse for the new movie, he used his dog’s name as the codeword for the successful breaching of the dam.
The RAF replaced his marker. The new one just calls him ‘The Dog’.
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-lincolnshire-66098422
If you live anywhere near Southern New Engand, there is a reading of the whole book at the New Bedford Whaling Museum on Melville’s Birthday.
Unfortunately, it’s in January, (Brrrrrr)
Some of the “dignitaries” who read an assigned chapter, are quite good. others are perfectly execrable.
In my humble opinion, the best readers are the High School kids. They are usually assigned the last chapter.
The Dog?
They could have called him Schvartze, what better word than a German derived Yiddish word meaning black person to celebrate the destruction of the Ruhr dams?
I think it was to Mexico and they had on the ground intelligence. So far the Left and the Venezualans have not jumped up screaming about innocent people just out for a cruise.
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